The big screen adaptation of It has turned Bill Skarsgård’s version of Pennywise the Clown into an overnight horror icon, but it’s been revealed that It almost had a cameo appearance from another horror legend: none other than Freddy Krueger.
In an interview with Aint-It-Cool-News (via SyfyWire), It director Andy Muschietti said that he briefly entertained the notion of having Pennywise, who shape shifts based on the fears of his child victims, appear as Freddy Krueger to one of the kids. Seeing as how It is a new New Line Cinema release, and the A Nightmare On Elm Street franchise is also owned by New Line, getting the rights wouldn’t have been an issue.
So why didn’t it end up happening? According to Muschietti, he said, “Obviously we considered that for a bit, but I really wasn’t too crazy about bringing stuff like Freddy into the story. I thought it was a bit too meta with New Line involved in the film. It’s distracting and it didn’t feel right, for some reason. I wanted to bring fears that were a little more layered and related to childhood trauma and more surprising in general.”
In Stephen King’s original novel, the childhood portions of the story take place in 1958, the era of “creature features” on television recycling things like the Universal monsters for a new generation of kids. Because of that, the fears of the kids often manifest into things like Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. With the story in the movie transposed to the ’80s, it would have made sense for at least one of the kids to be afraid of the movie slashers of the day who were insanely popular.
Had Freddy made his cameo, it would have been interesting to see if Robert Englund would have been the one to play the part. How cool would that have been? Although the Freddy cameo didn’t materialize, there is another nod to the dream stalker in the film — a movie marquee in the town of Derry shows a theater playing A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, which, of course, came out in the summer of ’89.
Do you think having Freddy show up in It would have been to distracting, or would it have made the movie even more memorable? Be sure to let us know your thoughts down below in the comments.
Images: New Line Cinema
